Cartoon of a man being checked on biometric fe...

Kamayani Bali Mahabal aka Kractivist

India is home to the largest number of children in the world,significantly larger than the number in China. The country has 20 percent of the 0-4 years’ child population of the world. The number of live births in the country is estimated to be 27 million,2 which again constitutes 20 per cent of the total number of live births in the

world.

 

The UID working paper on UID and Iris says that collecting and de-duplicating the biometrics of children is a challenge – face and finger biometrics are not stable until the age of 16. The lack of de-duplication of a child’s biometrics would require that the child’s

UID be linked to the parents’UIDs in the database and the child’s ID is not issued on the basis of deduplication of his/her biometrics.

 

This however, increases the risk of duplicates/fakes among UIDs for children.

 

Lets look at one state Jharkhand , where kids eyes bear brunt of poor diet .More than 54 percent of the around 52 lakh children in Jharkhand suffer from malnourishment and a

large number of them have eye-related ailments like cataract,according to data made available by the state government.

 

 

 

Out of the total global population of visually challenged of 45 million, 12 million are in India. Children below 16 years account for 1.4 million cases of blindness in India.

 

Hence , UID will actually exclude million of cases because of malnutrition-induced Cataract. Finger prints, too, would generate a lot of noisy data which may ultimately be unusable. There are no existing standards for the creation / collection of biometric data in India and consequently no way to monitor the process.

 

There is no means of controlling the recording and retrieval of data about children, and that is especially serious since our jurisprudence clearly states that the records relating to children except public exam marks should not

be carried into adulthood. This is especially important where the child has had a difficult growing up and may have encountered problems of being a `neglected child’ or a `child in conflict with the law’.

 

These are specifically proscribed from being carried into adulthood,with good reason. The UID, with its ability to link up data bases poses a threat to this important area of personal safety and protection of the child.

 

I want to ask UIDAI are we sending our kids to school or to prison? We wouldnt accept fingerprinting for adults without informed consent so it is utterly outrageous that children as young as five are being targeted. As a parent we make decisions for our children on a daily

basis some will affect their lives for the next few minutes others will potentially affect the rest of their lives.When replacing any existing system it is often easier to see how a new system fixes the

 

shortcomings in the existing system, but often its the case that any new system also comes with its own set of weaknesses some of which were not immediately evident.

 

What are the consequences of imposing this untried project that is in a legal vacuum on the children in your state. China has, for instance,banned the practice of fingerprinting in schools as being too intrusive and an infringement of children’s rights.The question of

informed consent is an important element in public policy.

 

It is also ironical that the Indian state is promoting the UID projectin India at a time when several countries across the world (including the USA, the UK, Australia, China, Canada and Germany) have scrapped similar projects. In UK, there are schools which use fingerprints to

identify individuals arriving at school, in a tactic to reduce truancy. Pupils would touch a fingerprint reader to show they were in school or in an individual lesson. But there have been concerns about how such personal biometric data is stored or who else might have access to such information. And there have also been disputes about

the rules governing the collection and use of such data from young people.

 

India has ratified the International Covenant on Child Rights and the

 

Article 2 of the CRC States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that the child is protected against all forms of discrimination or punishment on the basis of the status, activities,expressed opinions, or beliefs of the child’s parents, legal,guardians, or family members.

 

Article 8 states that the States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her

identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference. When replacing any existing system, it is often easier to see how a new system fixes the

shortcomings in the existing system, but often it is the case that any new system also comes with its own set of weaknesses some of whichwere not immediately evident.

READ MORE EXPOSE  BELOW

How UID will kill Patient rights #Healthcare #Aadhaar

Coercive Politics of UID and Scholarships

IS UID A MAGIC NUMBER ?

India – are we being Made Guinea Pigs #UID

 

References

 

The Fingerprint Authentication Report is at

 

http://uidai.gov.in/images/FrontPageUpdates/role_of_biometric_technology_in_aadhaar_authentication_feb_6th_summary_dvd_final.pdfhttp://uidai.gov.in/images/FrontPageUpdates/role_of_biometric_technology_in_aadhaar_authentication_feb_6th_summary_dvd_final.pdf

 

The Iris PoC on authentication is at

 

http://uidai.gov.in/images/iris_poc_report_14092012.pdf

 

Report from a study done in Notre Dame University on iris aging, especially because of the presumption with which the Iris PoC starts, that iris is unchanging, at

 

http://www.cse.nd.edu/~kwb/FenkerBowyerCVPRW_2012.pdf

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